Books of 2013 #2: Gun Machine

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My friend Mike wonders how Warren Ellis gets away with only writing a book every few years, but if he continues to improve at this rate, he can stay on this pace as long as he likes.

Ellis is mostly famous as the author of Transmetropolitan, an influential comic that ran between 1997 and 2002. Since then, he’s also written a wide variety of other titles, both creater-owned and otherwise (and also including the source material for the 2010 film RED, about which Ellis has said “if you don’t want to see a film with Helen Mirren with a sniper rifle, I’m not sure I want to know you.”) However, he’s also written prose, most notably the 2007 novel Crooked Little Vein, which I read and enjoyed.

Vein was a fine, if short, bit of work, and was mostly carried by Ellis’ voice. If you’re familiar with his blog and other online work, it’s easy to see its protagonist as a stand-in for Ellis himself (not in a wish-fulfillment Mary Sue sort of way at all, though, unless Ellis actually has a jones for scrotal inflations). Its plot was well into the sort of grotesque/absurd area that Ellis has explored in some detail in his graphic work; Wikipedia’s plot summary starts with

Michael McGill, a burned-out private eye is hired by a corrupt White House Chief of Staff to find a second “secret” United States Constitution, which had been lost in a whorehouse by Richard Nixon.

So. Right. It was fun and all, but it also (and obviously) absurdist.

Gun Machine (out this week) is very different. Our hero, New York Detective John Tallow, is still somewhat Ellis-ian (and, like McGill, he’s got some goofy sidekicks), but the story is an inventive and real-world police procedural mostly devoid of the absurd flourishes that formed the bulk of Vein. It’s also significantly longer without being padded.

Ellis starts us with a violent and shocking set piece that ends with our hero seeing his partner killed before killing the assailant himself; the gunfire exposes a heretofore apparently sealed tenement apartment completely full of guns. Guns adorn nearly every inch of the wall, floor, and ceiling. And, as it happens, every one they test turns out to be tied to some unsolved homicide, going back twenty years or more.

It’s a weird setup, which we expect from Ellis, and I worried a bit that the excesses of Vein would show up and run off with the story. That never happens. Instead, we get a solid and disciplined novel that I found very hard to put down. It’s still a bit weirder than so-called mainstream thrillers, but mostly in tone. (The killer’s totemic apartment ties into his own delusions, not some secret mystical power, for example.)

If I have one complaint here, it’s that the conclusion of the work is a bit abrupt — though by no means as unsatisfying as, say, some of Lee Child’s work has been (all these guys could take a lesson from the late Mr Parker on that front). I get that endings are hard, and Ellis’ isn’t bad, but I definitely came away wishing the last chapter had fleshed a few things out a bit more. That’s a nit, though. Gun Machine was big fun, and I’ll be first in line to read Ellis’ next novel even if he takes another five years to churn it out. (Confidential to W.E.: Please don’t.)

Now: I think I’ll read something completely devoid of policemen.

Books of 2013 #1: The Last Policeman

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I realized, in retrospect, that I’d read too much ephemeral bullshit online last year and not enough actual books, so my only real resolution for 2013 is to read more books. I certainly have no shortage of candidates — a revised online information diet would still include plenty of sources for new interesting tomes, and that’s where I found book 2013.1, The Last Policeman.

It’s no secret I mostly read so-called “serious” books, but my travel schedule and (frankly) age have softened that prejudice a bit in recent years. I’ve read more SF, devoured all of the Harry Dresden books, and even picked up a bit of a mystery/thriller habit that I initially thought was confined to Robert Parker’s “Spenser” novels (turns out I was wrong, and as a consequence I know in my bones that Tom Cruise is absolutely NOT Jack Reacher).

Anyway, book #1 for 2013 is a hybrid title. The Last Policeman is both a mystery and, technically, a science fiction story. The argument is this: owing to the impending and inexorable arrival of a large asteroid, Earth as we know it has about six months to go. We join the story in media res on that point; the protagonist (Detective Hank Palace) fills us in on the recent past as part of the narrative, so we get to explore how the world reacted as the likelihood of impact moved from “nothing to worry about” to “oh God, oh God, we’re all going to die.” His rumination gives us most of the speculative-fiction bits in the novel (which is otherwise set in a world basically just like our own), since obviously the impending doom of all or most of mankind is going to do some very weird things to society, to the economy, to geopolitics, and most notably to individual humans themselves.

Palace’s job as a murder cop has become very odd indeed, since, as zero-hour approaches, more and more people are opting to check out early. Suicides are rampant, which of course creates an excellent smokescreen for a murder or two. It’s not at all inventive that the story hinges on Palace deciding one particular “hanger” was in fact a murder, but it is inventive that it takes place in a world where “well, so fucking what?” is an increasingly viable answer.

The book’s not high lit by any stretch of the imagination — I read the whole thing on New Year’s Day — but it was definitely fun. I’ve learned to be kind of circumspect about recommendations from places like BoingBoing or IO9, but this time around I wasn’t disappointed. I expect I’ll read the other two books Ben Winters has planned for Detective Palace.

Cotton Foolishness

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It turns out Johnny Football is more fun to watch when he’s playing someone else; Leonard’s Loser is of course the freshly-routed Sooners, and we’re completely okay with that.

It does make us a little sad, though, to see that the Cotton Bowl game is no longer played in the actual Cotton Bowl; like most other big time football games in Dallas, it’s played at Cowboys Stadium over in Arlington (which, you’ll note, isn’t Dallas).

I actually noticed something interesting about StarHat Stadium at the beginning of the season, back when Alabama opened against Michigan there as a “neutral site” game. Jerryworld is much smaller than either college’s home facility — Michigan’s Big House has the largest seated capacity in the US at almost 110K; Bryant-Denny (#5) holds nearly 102K. A capacity crowd at the Cowboys’ home is a paltry 80K (#25), which made the game a particularly hot ticket. In fact, as I noted back then, Jerryworld isn’t even the biggest stadium in the Dallas area. The venerable, neglected Cotton Bowl seats 92,000.

This is a great one-point example of something that shocks folks who aren’t college gridiron fans: the biggest stadiums in the US are for college football. The largest pro field is the Giants/Jets home MetLife Stadium, which ranks 15th at about 83K; the top 14 are all for the college game, and the top 6 seat more than 100,000 people.

Anyway, the gist of this little trivia blurb is really just to tee up some snarking on bad journalism. This awful little bit over at Yahoo’s sports blogs talks a lot about how the Cotton Bowl Classic “outgrew” its original staidum home, and went on to “bigger and better” things, without once noting this very simple fact: its new home seats fewer people. Sure, parking’s probably better, and the facility itself is much nicer (the Cotton Bowl was built in 1930), but it sure as shit isn’t bigger than the Cotton Bowl itself.

Things I’ll Bet You Didn’t Know, College Football Edition

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The other night, something weird happened in a bowl game that, apparently, has only happened one other time in Division I college football: the offense scored a 1-point safety on a point-after attempt.

This has resulted in LOTS of confusion and ignorant statements, which is par for the course with sports, and in this case it’s at least partially justified because the rules for college are very, very different from high school and college on this point. In those leagues, a change in possession during a PAT or 2-point conversion ends the play. No points are scored, and the kickoff proceeds normally. Not so in the NCAA.

The actual sequence of play in the Oregon game was something like this:

  1. Oregon lines up for a PAT kick.
  2. Ball is snapped.
  3. K State blocks the kick, and recovers the ball outside the end zone. (This is where, in the NFL or high school, the play would be whistled dead.)
  4. Wildcat player enters his own end zone to evade Ducks.
  5. Duck tackles Wildcat in the Wildcat end zone to end the play.

(The Wildcat, as part of his run, had also fumbled and recovered his own fumble, but this part wasn’t relevant to the ruling.)

The ruling on the field, which is correct, is that the Ducks scored a 1-point safety. This confused the bejesus out of some people; fortunately, we here at Heathen are some intensely pedantic motherfuckers.

So:

Perusing the aforelinked NCAA rules actually makes this much clearer than you’d expect. The most stark thing you notice in that PDF is that the words “extra point” or “two point conversion” aren’t used in the rules. As far as the NCAA is concerned, there are only touchdowns, field goals, and safeties — but these things occur in both regular play and try downs, which are the single plays run after a touchdown scored in regularly play. You know a try down as the PAT or two-point conversion attempt. The try down is the source of much confusion!

During regularly play, as you know, a touchdown is 6, a field goal is 3, and a safety is 2. During a try down, however, the touchdown is 2, and the field goal and safety are worth only 1. (N.B. that this means an intercepted 2-point attempt run all the way back to the other end zone would be worth 2, not 6; this is called a defensive two-point conversion, and is also only possible in NCAA football.)

What happened in the Fiesta Bowl is clearly a safety — the player entered his own end zone deliberately, and was downed there. That counts as a safety in regular play, and in college try downs are no different. As a consequence, Oregon was awarded the single point.

As noted, this is super, super rare — but even rarer is a possibility allowed for the rules, but never actually seen in play: it’s possible (but incredibly unlikely) for the defense to score a safety on a try, too. Should a member of the kicking team deliberately enter his own end zone while holding the ball, and be downed there (say, after recovering a fumble from an intercepting defender who caught butterfinger disease a yard shy of the end zone), the defense would score a defensive conversion safety worth a single point — which means that, contrary to popular opinion, a score of 1 is possible in American football after all.

That’s it. It’s over. No one will EVER make a more awesome New Year’s Eve show.

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It’s fair to say that KDOC in LA had a little technical trouble the other night, but it’s also fair to say that this was by no means the extent of their problems — clearly stoned guests, rampant F-bombs, drunk talent wondering aloud if they’re live, cuts to black and dead air, Jaime Kennedy, etc. The link is to a clip, but the YouTube poster has promised the whole thing this weekend.

Via Patton Oswalt on Twitter. Also over at Grantland.

Things that need to stop

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Recently, businesses that have my cell number have decided it’d be okay to text me.

I disagree. Texts are fine if you’re my friend, or co-worker, or know me in some legitimate way. However, I am in no way okay with receiving automated texts of any kind.

So far, the only actual recourse I’ve found is to insist that these businesses delete my cell number. It’s apparently now a given that, if they have that number, they’ll generate automated texts. There’s no opt-out, short of zapping the number, which is annoying — if they want to call me, that’s fine. I just don’t want the texts.

It turns out that there ARE ways to block some kinds of automated texts, but I’m not 100% sure this will work — the culprits for me are reservation or appointment systems, but it does seem possible that they’re using the same internet-gateway type approach.

It’s the “former movie actor” part that kills me

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The caption for this 1958 photo is “Patrolman Louis Romano questions former movie actor Lawrence Tierney in the West 54th Street Police Station early today. Tierney was arrested after a bruising battle with Romano and another policeman on Sixth Avenue after they had ejected him from a bar. All three were given treatment at a hospital and released.”

Some Heathen may recognize Tierney’s name, as the caption’s opinion of his career’s status turned out to be a bit off, as he worked consistently from 1943 until his death in 2002. He was in Reservoir Dogs, for example. Best of all, though, is that he’s the guy who plays Elaine’s dad in a 1991 Seinfeld episode called “The Jacket.” His character was inspired by my favorite writer:

Elaine’s father, a published author, was inspired by Richard Yates, author of Revolutionary Road, who Larry David had met while dating his daughter. Tierney’s performance as Elaine’s father was praised by the cast and crew, who intended to make Alton Benes a recurring character. However, they became frightened of Tierney when it was discovered that he stole a knife from the set.

WHERE THE HELL HAVE YOU BEEN?

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Here at Miscellaneous Heathen, we don’t usually go in for the sorts of year-in-review bullshit you see elsewhere, but this time around my “list of cities visited” is at least nominally interesting. I count only places that were destinations, not cities I flew through (though, to be fair, I also didn’t connect for any flights this year):

  • Dallas, TX
  • Tuscaloosa, AL
  • Jackson, MS
  • Hattiesburg, MS
  • Laurel, MS
  • Naples, FL
  • Dubai, UAE
  • Abu Dhabi, UAE
  • Al Ain, UAE
  • Louisville, KY
  • New Orleans, LA
  • Washington, DC

Odds are this is a calmer list than 2013 will produce, given our accelerating sales calendar, but it may be a long while before there’s any more international travel.

Say my name.

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I have, finally, caught up on Breaking Bad. (SAY MY NAME.)

It just got bleaker and bleaker — and better and better — throughout the final half-season, right up until the very last cliffhanger moment. That seemed precious and contrived, honestly, and too cheap for a show with so much going for it.

Spoilery comments welcome here, so if you’re not up to date, don’t read ’em.

So, what kills us?

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This set of interactive data visualizations is pretty amazing. You can filter by gender and by causes or groups of causes (say, communicable vs noncommunicable disease), with each change showing you the “probability that a 15-year-old in that country will die [of the displayed conditions] before reaching age 60 if mortality trends in that country remained the same.” It’s really a fascinating tool.

Via io9, who quite reasonably ask what the hell is up with the poison boom?

If this were about someone else, we’d call it character assassination

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Fortunately, it’s just about Robert Bork. The first two paragraphs:

Robert Bork, who died Wednesday, was an unrepentant reactionary who was on the wrong side of every major legal controversy of the twentieth century. The fifty-eight senators who voted against Bork for confirmation to the Supreme Court in 1987 honored themselves, and the Constitution. In the subsequent quarter-century, Bork devoted himself to proving that his critics were right about him all along.

Bork was born in 1927 and came of age during the civil-rights movement, which he opposed. He was, in the nineteen-sixties, a libertarian of sorts; this worldview led him to conclude that poll taxes were constitutional and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was not. (Specifically, he said that law was based on a “principle of unsurpassed ugliness.”) As a professor at Yale Law School, his specialty was antitrust law, which he also (by and large) opposed.

The new scripture.

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This was forwarded to me on Twitter a few days before Christmas:

And in those days Caesar Augustus decreed that all must return to the town of their birth, that they might sort out their parents’ computers.

It made me laugh. And then I got to my mother’s house, where in the course of about two days, I:

  • Switched them from 800 Kbps DSL to 20Mbps cable, and saved them $8 a month in the process;
  • Checked their AT&T and Comcast bills to ensure they’re on the right plans;
  • Configured my mother’s new MacBook Air, and migrated all her old apps and data to it;
  • Upgraded pretty much every app after migration, since the old Mac was 5+ years old;
  • Upgraded her phone to the newest rev of iOS, so she can sync properly with the new Mac;
  • Set her up with a free Dropbox, to ease her management of iPhone pix;
  • Updated and reconfigured CrashPlan on both her new Air and my stepfather’s iMac;
  • Sorted out a Mailman “explosion” that filled my stepdad’s inbox (I’d love to know whose idea it was to sign every doctor in Mississippi up to a licensing listserve, but my guess is that they’re getting what-for already).

It’s a new holiday tradition!

Seriously, though, it’s good to be sure they’re properly configured, on good hardware, using good services, and that it’s all ship-shape.

Wait. What?

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In this background piece on the AR-15 over at TPM, I was shocked to read this sentence:

Advocates say semi-automatic rifles are also becoming more popular for home defense. A recent article in Guns & Ammo, titled “Long Guns, Short Yardage: Is .223 the Best Home Defense Caliber?,” said sales of AR-15 type rifles “skyrocketed” after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. The same article pointed to a 2010 National Shooting Sports Foundation survey which found that the second most popular reason for owning a “modern sporting rifle” — the polite term for semi-automatic rifles like the AR-15 types — was home defense.

Jesus FUCK what a terrible idea. The AR shoots a tiny bullet, sure, but it throws it downrange at absurd velocities — enough to puncture a helmet at 500 yards. If Tommy Tactical locks and loads his AR when the hypothetical crackhead busts down his door, yes, it’s very likely the intruder will end up in the morgue. Sure. I’ll grant that. But the other thing that’s CERTAIN to happen is that our wannabe Rambo’s bullets will pass right through the bad guy, right through sheetrock, and out of his house into the rest of the world. This is called overpenetration, and it’s a serious problem for anyone shooting in a populated area.

A much better choice would be some lumbering slow-moving round like a .45ACP pistol, or even a shotgun loaded with buckshot. Your home is not going to be invaded by barbarian hordes; keep that .223 in the safe and shoot it at the range, for crying out loud.

A little reminder about Senator Daniel Inouye

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The recently deceased senior senator from Hawaii was also a complete and undeniable badass. Initially denied the right to serve his country because of his Japanese ancestry, he eventually managed to enlist.

Then this happened:

Inouye’s platoon had been ordered to capture a German strong point along the Colle Musatello Ridge, so naturally this guy decided to go in guns blazing. He led his team through intense fire to capture an observation post, a mortar team, and an artillery position (no bigs), and then moved his troops within 40 yards of a heavily-fortified defensive line, where they immediately came under heavy suppressing fire from three different heavy machine gun positions. Inouye didn’t give a fuck. He started chucking grenades like a madman, trying to blast the bunkers apart. This was fun for a while, but as he stood up to lob yet another explosive he was suddenly shot through the abdomen by a German MG bullet that passed all the way through his torso and came mere inches from severing his spine.

Naturally, this only pissed him off.

So, with the rest of his men pinned down by heavy weapons, the wounded Lieutenant grabbed a backpack of frags and started army-crawling up the ridge towards the enemy guns. As soon as he was close enough, he assaulted the first machine gun nest on his own, taking it out with a grenade from just five yards away and then clearing the rest of it out Al Capone-style with a spray of .45-caliber ammunition from his badass Tommy gun. When that one was taken care of, Inouye sprinted to a second position, dual-chucking two grenades that redecorated the walls of the bunker with Fascist parts.

Unfortunately, the time Inouye was headed for the third position, the Germans were ready for him – the dudes in this nest had just watched this insane-as-fuck little Japanese dude flying around bombing the shit out of their buddies, and these motherfuckers weren’t about to sit back and let Inouye just hand-deliver a fragmentation explosive into their rectums without a fight. So when Inouye was sprinting across open ground a mere 10 yards the machine gun nest, suddenly he saw a German dude pop up from behind a sandbag, aim a rifle-mounted grenade at him, and blast him at point-blank range with the WWII version of an RPG.

The blast covered Inouye with shrapnel and shredded his right arm to the point where it was barely still attached. This, however, failed to stop him. Inouye simply looked down at his useless arm (which was still clutching a hand grenade), pried the grenade out of it with his left hand, and lobbed it underhand right into the dumbfounded German’s face from about 15 feet away. The results weren’t pretty.

From this point on in the battle, Lieutenant Daniel Inouye of the 442nd Regimental Combat Team went into Total Fucking Berserker Meltdown Mode. He doesn’t even remember what happened next – but his awestruck platoon members sure as fuck do.

While still bleeding profusely from the mangled stump that used to be his right arm, Daniel Inouye ditched the grenades, unslung the Tommy Gun, and started firing it one-handed while running all over the goddamned battlefield like a fucking maniac, blasting the holy living shit out of anything with a gray helmet. He cleared out the third machine gun position with the Tommy Gun, changed the magazine, and then started running towards the main body of the enemy position, by himself, shooting the machine gun with his off-hand, wasting Nazis left and right in a hail of gigantic bullets. Finally, after rampaging like a madman, Inouye was shot in the leg, lost his footing, and fell down a hill. Unable to move, but unwilling to back down, Inouye propped himself up against the nearest tree, kept firing, and refused to be evaluated until his Sergeants had moved the unit into position and prepared defenses for the inevitable German counterattack. All told, he had killed 25 Germans and wounded 8 more, and he’d literally done it all single-handedly. When the men in his unit came to the hospital and recounted the events to Inouye, his exact words were, “No, that can’t be… you’d have to be insane to do all that.”

No shit.

Daniel Inouye received the Distinguished Service Cross, which was later upgraded to the Medal of Honor. He lost the arm and had it replaced with a badass hook, and after 20 months of surgery and recovery in various military hospitals, he went home, got a law degree, and worked as a prosecuting attorney. In 1962 he was almost unanimously elected to the Senate (thus making him the first Japanese-American in Congress) — he’s won the post nine times since then, making him the longest-serving current member of the Senate and the second-longest serving Senator in the history of the United States.